


Coming Out

by musiclvr1112



Series: Friends to Lovers AU [5]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Aged Up, Cloud Watching, Coming Out, Demisexuality, Explicit Language, F/M, demisexual chloe, hungover nath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 09:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16699771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musiclvr1112/pseuds/musiclvr1112
Summary: This one takes place immediately after "The Hangover" and before "Angel on Fire"





	Coming Out

“Chloé, what is going on? What are we doing in the park? You hate the park.” Ignoring him, she continued to move one direction, then the other as she searched for that one particular spot. “What are you looking for?”

“Here!” she finally declared, neatly placing her picnic blanket down on the ground. Last time she did this, her suit was already ruined, but there wasn’t a chance in hell she would willingly get grass stains on another article of clothing.

“Here what?” He stood there scowling as she sat down. “What are you doing?”

“It’s not what _I’m_ doing,” she finally replied. “It’s you.” The redhead rolled his eyes, clearly still too hungover for this. He winced as the day’s bright sun glared down at him.

“Okay, then what am _I_ doing?”

“You,” Chloé patted the spot next to her and he begrudgingly sat down, “are going to teach me how to cloud watch.”

…

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Teach me how to cloud watch.” The artist merely stared at her blankly. She rolled her eyes. “Do you remember this spot? This is where you were cloud watching when I tripped and joined you and to this day I have no fucking clue why on Earth anyone would spend their time staring at the sky. Teach me.” Without another word, she lay back and watched him expectantly. With a deep sigh, he finally relented and lay down next to her.

“Alright, but first give me your sunglasses.” Chloé plucked her favorite accessory from atop her head and handed them over. “In case you didn’t know,” he said as he put them on, “it’s very rude to force someone with a hangover to stare at the sky.”

“Oh I know. Now teach me.”

One last aggravated sigh before he finally realized resistance was futile. “What do you see here?”

Chloé stared up at the sky. Light blue. White clouds. Bright sun. “I see a sky.”

“What do you see in the sky?”

“Clouds.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What do you see in the clouds?”

“Water…vapor?”

“No, like, the shape of the clouds. Try that one,” he pointed a to a small puffy cloud. “What does it look like to you?”

“It looks like a cloud,” she said.

“What kind of cloud?”

“A small one?”

“Good. What else?”

“What do you mean what else?”

“I mean describe the cloud to me in detail. Pretend I had gone blind for the day. How would you make me see it?”

“It’s white. And small. And it’s in the sky. I don’t get it, what do you want from me?”

“Okay, I’ll go first.” He raised his arm and pointed toward the left side of the cloud, where the cloud came to a small point. “That’s its nose. And the little dark spot further in is its eye. It’s a poodle because it has that poof on its head.” Chloé followed his direction, turning her head as if to get a better angle. From the “head” the cloud stretched in a vaguely rectangular form, with one strand…

“Oh! And that’s its paw, raised in front, right?”

“There you go,” he said in a tired sigh. He dropped his arm back down to his stomach. “Now you try on your own.”

She hummed as she stared at the different clouds. “That one looks like a tornado.”

“How so?”

“What do you mean? Is that wrong?”

“No, I just want you to explain how it looks like a tornado.”

“Well, it’s…swirly.”

“And?”

“I still don’t get what you want from me here.”

He sighed. “Like I said, pretend I’ve gone blind for the day. If I was blind, I still wouldn’t know what this cloud looks like based off of your description.”

“This is what you do when you cloud watch? You stress over describing clouds to a blind person?”

“No, that was just to get you started. When I cloud watch, I find shapes and pictures in the clouds. It’s good for my creativity. Sometimes I actually study them so I can paint them later. In general, it’s just…really…therapeutic…” His words slowed toward the end of his sentence and when she turned to look at him, she saw his face pinch up into a frown. He turned his head to direct that frown at her.

“What?”

“You didn’t want me to teach you to cloud watch.”

“No I did not.”

“This was a trap.”

“Yes it was.”

Nathaniel breathed in deep and let it out slow, and with that breath, she watched loads of tension drop from his shoulders. Even from behind her sunglasses—which honestly, he had no right looking so pretty in those—she could see the warmth in the way he looked at her. In a friendship that mostly consisted of bickering and sarcastic quips, even if she always knew there was an underlying layer of genuine appreciation, to see it before her like this was always something that took her breath away.

“Thank you, Chloé.”

“You’re welcome.”

The two turned to look back at the sky and lay there in silence for a while. The sun was warm and perfectly accompanied by a gentle breeze that brushed stray strands of hair across her face here and there. And it really was nice to watch the clouds float by, even if she wasn’t finding images in them like the artist beside her.

She really did need to do this more often. Nathaniel was right; she was awfully high strung. She needed to remember to take time here and there to just breathe and exist in the moment. Like this.

“I never asked,” Nathaniel eventually said, “did you have fun last night?”

Chloé thought back to the party he had dragged her along to. It was full of people like him—creative types, rebellious types, wild types. People who thrived at night and underground, people who screamed for fun, people who were adventurous and chaotic and incredibly extraverted. But also, people who existed between the lines. People with identities and realities that weren’t always acknowledged outside of their world.

“Last night was…enlightening.”

“Enlightening?”

Chloé pressed her lips together for a moment. Was she really ready for this? Now without any alcohol in her system, her mind completely rested and fully functioning? Could she really admit this to him, let alone herself?

She finally turned to look at him only to find that he was already watching her. “Remember how I said I had a really enlightening conversation with Rae?”

“About gender?”

“Yes. But it was about a lot more than gender. Sexuality too. And love. And relationships.”

“Okay?”

His confusion carried a small note of worry in it, probably because of the nervous tone ringing clear in her voice. She took a deep breath.

“Nath, I think I’m demisexual.”

A moment passed of complete stillness.

He blinked. His head leaned back the slightest bit.

Then slowly nodding, he said, “That…makes a lot of sense actually.”

She couldn’t help the relieved smile that spread across her lips. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“Like…a lot.”

 _“A lot,”_ she agreed, light laughter trickling into her voice.

“Holy shit.” He began laughing with her. “You’re demisexual.”

She nodded, laughter building. “I’m demisexual.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t realize that before.”

“I didn’t even know it was a thing.”

That laughter slowly subsided, and the smile he was giving her shifted, and suddenly the warmth of the moment was back.

“You look happy,” he said.

She looked back up at the sky.

“I am.”


End file.
